Flashback

TWENTY-EIGHT

It had snowed heavily overnight, and from the top of Slavin Hill the Old City looked quaint as a miniature Christmas village, its baroque spires and Gothic rooftops cloaked in cottony white. The sun was shining, the sky crisp and blue, the golden crown atop the steeple of St. Martin’s cathedral glistening in the morning light. A tram ran along the river, then turned inland, stopping to unload a cargo of tiny figures before continuing on. Above it all, the castle sat gray and silent, watching the Danube and the plains beyond for the next invading force, as it had for some six hundred years. Only the hypermodern bridge, shuddering with rush-hour traffic, and the ugly high-rise suburbs across the river broke the illusion of perfection.

As early as it was, the war memorial was almost deserted, the only visitors besides us two old men sweeping snow from the wide steps, their stooped frames dwarfed by the monument’s immense pillar. A bronze plaque in several languages informed the ignorant of the six thousand Soviet war dead the memorial commemorated, boys who’d perished pushing the Nazis out of western Slovakia.

“Nine o’clock,” Brian said, glancing at his watch, stamping his feet to ward off the cold.

I pushed my hands deeper into the pockets of my new coat, my right fingers brushing the stock of the Beretta, my left fingers finding the memory card that Brian had copied the contents of the pen drive onto the night before. We’d left the original at Ivan’s apartment.

Two figures appeared from behind the memorial and started across the wide plaza in our direction. As they drew closer, I recognized them both. One was Werner. Beside him was my old friend Salim.

“You ready?” Brian asked.

“He’s brought his thug,” I whispered, curling my palm around the Beretta, resting my thumb next to the safety.

“I thought we asked you to leave your goons at home,” Brian said as Werner and Salim neared.

Werner stopped walking. “Mr. Aziz is my personal assistant.”

I shook my head.

“Come on,” Brian announced, grabbing my arm. “Let’s go.”

Werner let us walk toward the edge of the plaza. “Let’s be reasonable,” he called out finally, dismissing Salim with a wave of his hand. The younger man started back toward the memorial.

“We’re willing to trade,” Brian said as we retraced our steps. “But we do this on our terms.”

“Fair enough,” Werner agreed. “You have the film?”

I pulled the memory card from my pocket and held my hand out for Werner to see, then slid it back into my coat. “Here’s the deal,” I said. “First, you tell me who they are, the man and the woman on the tape. Second, I want a meeting with him. I don’t care how you arrange it; just make it happen.”

Werner looked at me with a mixture of pity and contempt. “My dear,” he said. “What makes you think I know the man on the tape?”

“You do,” I assured him.

“Sadly, I was robbed of the film before I got a chance to watch it. That said, I must admit I lack your conviction.”

“You mean you don’t know what’s on here?” I asked.

“To the contrary,” Werner corrected me. “I know exactly what is on the film. That’s why I agreed to buy it. There’s a murder, is there not?”

“Yes,” I said. “A woman, a journalist. A friend of yours. The man was a friend of yours, too.”

Werner rubbed his gloved hands together. His nose and cheeks were red from the cold, his lips pale and dry. “For a woman who remembers nothing,” he observed, “you know quite a lot.”

“The picture in your office in Marrakech,” I told him, “of you at Les Trois Singes. The man and the woman on the film are the same.”

Werner pulled the collar of his coat up around his neck. It was a distraction, a gesture meant to conceal, but for the briefest of moments he looked like a man who’d just taken a hard punch to the gut.

“You were in love with her, weren’t you?” I asked, remembering the photograph of the three of them, the way both men’s heads were turned in the woman’s direction, the looks on their faces.

“You’re certain this is the man?” he asked stonily, ignoring my question.

“Yes.”

Werner hesitated for a moment, looking past us toward some point on the far bank of the Danube, as if expecting the Hussites to come riding in at any moment. “Robert Stringer,” he announced. “That’s his name.”

“And the woman?” I asked.

“Catherine,” he said, his eyes hard on my face, his expression answering my earlier question. “Catherine Reed.”

There it was, I thought, a name. If I had nothing else, I had that. “Who were they?” I asked.

“Catherine was a journalist, like you said. An American.”

“And Stringer?”

“When we first met in Saigon, he was working for USAID.”

“And in Pakistan?”

“Officially, he was with the Asia Foundation.”

“And unofficially?”

“Everyone knew he was CIA.”

“Even Catherine Reed.”

“Catherine knew.”

“And Stringer’s side business with Naser Jibril?” I asked. “Did everyone know about that?”

Werner shook his head.

“But Catherine knew?”

“Because I told her,” Werner said, fumbling with his coat again.

“But you said you didn’t know it was Stringer on the film,” I reminded him.

“I didn’t,” he agreed, stopping for a moment before continuing on. “In my business, one hears things, a lot of it rumor, some of it fact. A friend of mine in the Pakistani border guard told me there was an American moving empty arms crates into Afghanistan. The guards were all thrilled because they were getting twice the regular payoff. It didn’t sound right to my friend, and it didn’t sound right to me, so I told Catherine, as a favor. I thought there might be a story there.”

“But you didn’t have anything to do with Stringer’s little pipeline?”

Werner shook his head. “I told you, I didn’t even know it was him.”

“And it never occurred to you that your favor might get Catherine killed?”

Werner shivered visibly. “I’ve told you enough,” he said. “I’ll arrange your meeting with Stringer. It will be my pleasure, but we’re done here. You’ll give me the film now.”

I took the memory card from my pocket. There was little use in holding on to it, now that Werner knew it was Stringer on the tape. “One more thing,” I said. “Leila Brightman worked for Stringer, didn’t she?”

“You really don’t know, do you?”

“No,” I told him.

“You worked for Stringer then, just like you were working for him when you stole this film.”

“You’re wrong about that,” I said. I held my hand out and offered him the memory card. “I went to your Casbah on my own.”

He took the card and stashed it in the inside pocket of his coat. “And why would you do that?” he asked.

I hesitated for a moment, part of me wanting to tell him the reason, that this woman he had loved I had loved as well. But something got the better of me. “I had my reasons,” I said.

“Don’t we all,” he agreed. Then he looked at Brian. “I will call Ivan in the next day or two.”

“We’ll be waiting,” Brian said.

Werner nodded and turned from us. It took him a while to cross the plaza, his heels kicking snow as he went. Alone, against the stark white plaza, with the monument and its monolithic pillar looming in front of him, he looked tired and defeated, just an old man on a winter morning. When he reached the memorial, he stopped and looked back at us, lingering briefly before disappearing from our view.

“Do you trust him to make this meeting with Stringer happen?” I asked Brian, as we started back toward where we’d parked the SEAT.

“Do you?” Brian asked.

“Yes,” I told him.

He nodded. “So do I.”

Ivan was already up and gone when we got back to the apartment, but he appeared almost immediately with breakfast supplies: fresh eggs, pastries, a loaf of bread, and a brand-new bottle of Russian vodka.

I’d been hard asleep and hadn’t heard him come in the night before, but from Ivan’s wan face and shaky hands I could tell he’d had another late night. There was a dark red bruise on the side of his neck, an oval the size and shape of a woman’s lips. I could see why some people found Ivan annoying, but there was also something fundamentally endearing about the Russian. There was an honesty to him, an unapologetic glee to his self-destruction that just made me like him.

“How did your meeting with the big guy go?” he asked, setting the food down, taking his coat off. “Everybody get what they wanted?”

“I hope so,” I said.

One of Ivan’s best qualities was his discretion. He hadn’t asked either of us why we’d wanted to meet Werner, just as he hadn’t pushed me on Hannah Boyle, and I was grateful to him for it.

“You got any plans for the next couple of days?” Brian asked.

Ivan shook his head. “I don’t have a flight until next week.”

“Good,” Brian told him. “We have some more business with Werner. He’s going to call you in the next day or two.”

“No problem, boss.” Ivan smiled, but I could tell he wasn’t at his cheery best. He set the pastries on a plate, put a pot of water on the stove to boil, and slumped down at the kitchen table with a cigarette. “I think I’m getting too old for this crap,” he admitted.

Brian laughed. “I think that happened a long time ago.”

Ivan’s cell phone rang, and he reached into the pocket of his coat to answer it, flashing Brian the middle finger of his free hand.

“Ivan,” he grunted into the receiver. A garbled voice crackled back at him.

Ivan mumbled something in Slovak, then got up and opened one of the kitchen drawers, pulled out a pencil and a piece of scrap paper, and scribbled a hasty note. A brief conversation ensued, with much laughter on Ivan’s side; then Ivan snapped the phone shut and turned to us.

“Got it,” he said triumphantly.

“Got what?” I asked.

“Stanislav Divin,” he said. “I talked to my friend at the police department while you guys were out. That was him calling back with Divin’s address. Apparently, he’s retired to the countryside, bought himself a little farm.” He handed me the piece of paper. “Some shithole outside of Kosice.”

I looked down at the paper, at Ivan’s barely legible scrawl. “Where’s Kosice?”

“Eastern Slovakia,” Brian offered. “Near the Hungarian border.”

“Can we get there by tonight?” I asked.

Brian looked at his watch. “There and back, if we leave soon.”